In brief

The University of Cambridge is setting up a new research lab to develop radical ways of solving the climate change crisis.

The Centre For Climate Repair will address concerns that existing, conventional, efforts to curb global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions will fall well short of what is needed to contain the damage.

Refreezing the Earth’s melting polar regions and sucking carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere are among the bold ideas the centre is expected to look into.

These kind of attempts at large-scale manipulation of an environmental process that affects the earth’s climate, in an attempt to counteract the effects of global warming, are known as geoengineering.

Little progress so far

So far, there has been a lot of talk about them but very little progress has been made in the real world.

Now, academics at Cambridge hope they can make some real strides forward.

“Time is no longer on our side,” said former chief government scientific adviser Sir David King, who is coordinating the project.

“Time is no longer on our side,”

Sir David King

“What we continue to do, what we do that is new, and what we plan to do over the next 10 to 12 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000,” he added.

Whitening the clouds

The idea to refreeze the polar region would involve spraying salt water high into the atmosphere to “whiten” clouds in the Arctic region in order to reflect heat back into space.

Meanwhile, removing carbon dioxide by the atmosphere could potentially be done by growing plants on sea and on land that would absorb the gases.

The fact that such expensive and science-fiction like solutions are being taken seriously enough for Cambridge University to set up the new department shows the scale of the threat posed by global warming, experts said.

In October the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading authority on global warming, warned that measures to cut greenhouse gases would need to be taken on an unprecedented scale to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Global warming so far

So far, there has been about 1C of warming, since 1850.

The panel said countries need to cut their carbon emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 and to “net zero” by 2050, with steep cuts in other greenhouse gases such as methane.

Net zero means that any emissions produced must be offset by sucking existing ones out of the air, as some geoengineering techniques will look to do.

The IPCC also said it would be necessary to look at carbon capture and storage technologies, which capture emissions sa they are created and pump them into underground storage areas.

A poll by YouGov last year found that a majority of people in Britain would be happy to reduce their consumption habits to slow or halt the negative effects of climate change.
One in three preferred an approach that relies on technological solutions to counter climate change.

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